Bought SSD, what non-SSD fast external hard drive is everyone getting?

[imacericg]

I pulled the trigger on an iMac with SSD. Need an external hard drive for my iTunes library and Documents. What fast non-SSD is everyone getting? Thinking 4-6TB.

 

[Juicy Box]

Need an external hard drive for my iTunes library and Documents. What fast non-SSD is everyone getting? Thinking 4-6TB.

I purchased an external RAID capable drive and then bought two external 3TB WD drives that were really cheap (cheaper than buying the same internal drive). I took the two WD internal drives out, put them into the RAID, and use that. It is faster than my Fusion Drive for writing, and just as fast for reading.
[doublepost=1516805654][/doublepost]I think this is the one I got:

Mediasonic ProRaid 2 Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 & eSATA Support UASP and SATA III 6.0Gbps Speed (HUR3-SU3S3)

 

[Fishrrman]

What does one need 4-6 terabytes for?

 

[Juicy Box]

What does one need 4-6 terabytes for?

Movies and video

 

[SaSaSushi]

Movies and video

Those, plus photos, music and Time Machine for me.

I also bought a 2-drive RAID enclosure and put in two 7200RPM Seagate 3TB HDD running RAID0 (with backup, of course). I am very pleased with the performance.

 

[Scary Spice]

Once you SSD, there are no 'fast' non-SSD drives.

 

[SaSaSushi]

Once you SSD, there are no 'fast' non-SSD drives.

For boot drives, I would agree.

For backup and storage purposes, (the topic of this thread) there are plenty of fast non-SSD options.

 

[Juicy Box]

Once you SSD, there are no 'fast' non-SSD drives.

SSDs are a must for boot drives now, but HDDs in RAID0 can be pretty fast.

I checked my Mac Pro that has a newish SSD for the boot drive, and two old HDDs in a software RAID0, and a single hard disk drive to back up everything. The SSD is fastest, but the software RAID drives are almost as fast.

I like platter drives when encoding video, as you still need a fast drive, but the bottleneck is typically other places like the CPU, so the fastest drive ever won't do anything.

I still think HDDs have their place, they are still much cheaper than SSDs.

 

[pixelatedscraps]

For external storage I use the following on a daily basis. The Sandisk being prohibitively expensive and not something I’d need for personal use.

Despite the bad rep they sometimes get, I’ve used LaCie Rugged drives for over 7 years without a single failure - touch wood - and they’ve proven themselves time and again.

For pure backup or media purposes, I’ve either gone with Seagate, Buffalo or WD external USB 3.0 drives.

• Sandisk Extreme 900 1.92Tb SSD USB-C (current on location project raw files for import / process / export)
• 2x LaCie Rugged 5Tb USB-C / TB HDD (raw image file archive of current year’s work)
• 2x Seagate Backup Plus 5Tb USB 3.0 (off site backup of the LaCie drives above, backed up weekly using Chronosync)

 

[pier]

I just buy regular SATA SSDs and put them in USB3 cases. You can get 1TB for less than $300 these days and the SATA speeds are fantastic at about 400-500MB/s.

If you need more speed than that for external storage get a thunderbolt PCIE chasis and buy PCIE SSD which can go up to 3.2GB/s such as this Samsung Evo Pro. This solution costs a lot more than using USB3 and SATA drives, and unless you are into high end video projects such as 8K RAW I doubt you realistically need such speeds.

Edit: I found this TB3 enclosure that can fit 2 SATA SSDS and allows for RAID for $99.

 

[powerslave65]

Seagate iron wolf 10 TB 300.00.
Speed 210 mbps
Kinda pricy but with a drive like that you will be set for a while.

 

[pier]

Seagate iron wolf 10 TB 300.00.
Speed 210 mbps
Kinda pricy but with a drive like that you will be set for a while.

According to Tech Radar it goes up to "sequential read speeds of 250.2 MB/s and write speeds of 229.2 MB/s" which is very good for a mechanical drive.